Britta's, a Balboa Village fixture for 14 years, recently relocated to Irvine -- for the most respectable of reasons: The old kitchen had only four burners. This is Newport Beach's loss, but Irvine's gain. The food served in the new place cleaves more or less to the same theme of seasonal menus, and the extra space has allowed the restaurant to stretch out a bit. The new Britta's is in the University Center, but once you're through the door, the parking lot melts away and it's easy to imagine that you're dining in the country at a quaint roadside inn. The high ceiling is all exposed beams and corrugated tin, from which ceiling fans dangle. The floor and bar are mahogany, and the room is dressed up with quiet, rustic flourishes that whisper country comfort without making you feel you've entered the "Green Acres" dimension. The food, like the atmosphere, is homey but not humble. You could categorize it as eclectic, but it's not guilty of the spottiness that usually goes with eclecticism; the kitchen keeps everything admirably in focus. The compact menu roves from pasta to pot roast, circles back to warm goat cheese and flies home with duck confit, and it does all equally well. Eclectic, to be sure. Still, the restaurant's baseline is the best of fundamental American culinary values: James Beard's "American Cookery" updated to reflect that we've fully internalized a lot of international influences. The guiding hand here is owner Britta Pulliam, who keeps a watchful eye on the customers. I like her sense of taste. There's nothing iconoclastic going on, and the flavors are delightfully uncluttered and nicely balanced. The place serves wholesome breakfasts and lunches, big on multigrains, but let's examine dinner. A nice appetizer is the pizzetta with wild mushrooms and Brie. The crust is crisp and the earthiness of oyster mushrooms runs a grounding cable into the sharp funkiness of the melted cheese. It's further harmonized by a sprinkling of fresh basil. A similarly successful balancing act comes in the form of a roasted pear stuffed with goat cheese. On my first visit, the soup was a dense multi-bean affair with a stout base of tomato and chicken stock worthy of a minestrone. I would, however, suggest rethinking the crab cakes. Despite their deep golden brown color, the breading is rather spongy, depriving us the contrasting textures that we expect from crab cakes. This is largely a matter of preference, but for my money the filling could use more, well, filler. It's composed mainly of crab meat (quite good, albeit) with a few flecks of herbs, celery and red bell pepper. The flavors hit the right notes, but it's a bit stringy. The entrées walk a nice line between heartiness and delicacy; the food leaves you feeling comfortably full but not overstuffed, and the portions are generous but not ridiculous. The double-cut pork chop would provide enough fuel for a day of splitting firewood; more to the point, it's the most tender pork chop I've come across in a while. The delicious mashed potatoes that accompany it are almost like pudding -- they're moistened with buttermilk -- and the stuffing is rendered from good day-old bread and is full of hazelnuts and celery root. There's also a fine rendition of duck confit. This hindquarter of duck points up many of the virtues of a confit: The flesh is soft and pleasantly chewy, with just the right intensity of flavor, though the skin is not as crisp as it might be. The side dishes, as usual here, show a good deal more thought than you generally find. For instance, I'm wary of risotto as a side dish because so often it's an unappetizing mush by the time it reaches the plate, but scarcely anything could go better with that duck confit than creamy risotto tossed with thin strips of caramelized turnip. Completing the plate are three heads of braised Belgian endive, split in half and caramelized on the bottom. Fresh and faintly bitter, they provide a worthy counterpoint to everything else. If you're hankering for comfort food, try the winter vegetable and chicken pasta. It's rigatoni cloaked in a voluptuous Gorgonzola cream sauce. With the high-pitched cheese and the baritone flavors of Brussels sprouts, arugula and wild mushrooms, once again we have a well-balanced dish. The only dish I've had that fell flat was a special of beef tenderloin in red wine and currant sauce. The beef was tender and moist but needed salt and pepper -- or something -- and the sauce was somehow one-dimensional. At dessert time, there are ice creams made on the premises, including excellent vanilla and espresso flavors. I've also had an excellent cranberry sorbet. And if you long ago wrote off devil's food cake, Britta's version will make you change your position. It's moist, dense and packed with flavor, and it beats the devil out off all those tiresome flourless chocolate cakes we've been besieged with lately. -- Martin Booe, Special to The Times

CONTINENTAL DRIFT Brittas brings Europe a little closer
TOM VASICH Published on October 04, 2001
It's not all neutrinos and stem cells at UC Irvine. "So, have you been to Britta's yet?" asks a molecular biologist who's discovering how to reverse the crippling effects of multiple sclerosis in test mice when he's not trying out new restaurants. It's a question I've been hearing often about the latest addition to the University Center plaza across the street from the campus.
"Sure, I used to go to the place when it was on the peninsula," I say. "What do you think?" And on it goes. Aside from the usual campus gossip, faculty and staff at old 'Eater U love to talk about restaurants, and Britta's is the latest buzz—a buzz that has been a long time in coming because, frankly, the University Center's restaurant lineup had become as stale as year-old crackers.
A few of the old places there, like Steelhead Brewery and the Asia Noodle Café, are certainly good enough, but the center's dining scene needed new blood more than Keith Richards after the Sticky Fingers tour. So now there's Britta's, a quaint, European-style café where servers offer you individual pieces of bread (baguette or pumpernickel?) and a savory rustic tart isn't some old queen sashaying through a gay Parisian bistro but an appetizer you'll completely enjoy. It's a great addition to the center, mostly because it's so civilized, so quaint and so very anti-Irvine, which, if you spend a good part of your day in that fine community, is most appreciated.
The Britta in question is Britta Pulliam, who for 14 years ran her charming little café a short walk from the Balboa Pavilion. It wasn't knock-down-the-doors popular, but if you appreciated a traditional omelet for breakfast or a warm bowl of beef stew on a chilly winter's eve, you knew Britta's.
But Britta closed down her little place in July and reappeared during the Labor Day weekend in the old Trocadero spot adjacent to the Trader Joe's. And the place couldn't be more popular. Usually, it's no problem finding a table in a University Center restaurant, but Britta's is pretty much filled all the time.
And for good reason. In the best continental tradition, Britta and her cooks prepare food in a way that brings out the best in each ingredient. Nothing is flashy or driven by overwhelming ingredients. You get the feeling after eating an entrée at Britta's that there's no other way it should be prepared.
Britta's features seasonal menus, so all we've had to sample thus far is the autumnal one. As new restaurants are wont to do, Britta's has kept its dinner menu small—no more than 10 appetizers and entrées, with a few salads tossed in.
This menu is a delight, with dishes featuring strong, individual flavors that will leave you savoring each bite. Among the starting dishes, the only real choice if you're feeling trés European is the daily cheese selection, the staple of the French countryside diet (non-liquid variety). Quality French cheeses are the ultimate indulgence, and Britta's features at least three each night (they differ depending on availability), each filled with taste-bud-popping delight. It's $12 for a few little chunks of cheese and fruit, but this isn't the Cheddar you buy at Albertson's.
The entrées similarly feature the best ingredients. The chicken pasta swims in a Bill Gates-level rich garlic-cream sauce with wild mushrooms and sharp Swiss chard—you'll find nothing like this at the Olive Garden. A rainbow trout is filled with forest mushrooms, and a steak filet is covered with a rich Gorgonzola and spicy cracked peppers. Cheese lovers will freak out over the calzone packed with goat cheese, buffalo mozzarella, proscuitto and tomatoes.
But Britta's does German food best. The Oktoberfest dinner at the old place—prepared by Britta, her mother and her grandmother—were legendary, and the best of that appears in the pork tenderloin dinner. Slices of tender pork are covered in a tangy blackberry-port wine-rosemary infusion sauce and laid over a spot of cabbage and a delicious bed of spaetzle, which, if there were justice in this world, would replace mashed potatoes as a starchy side dish. This meal is the most un-Irvine food you can eat—indulge.
So the molecular biologist ultimately gives Britta's a thumb's up, but opines, "It's too expensive." True, entrées range from $13.50 to $32 for the Gorgonzola filet (my dear pork tenderloin is $23), and the wines under $30 aren't too intriguing. But as I wrote recently of Jimmy Z Grill, which is just a few blocks down the street from the University Center, Irvine could use a few more good restaurants. Actually, a lot more.